VDEh-Betriebsforschungsinstitut GMBH (BFI)

VDEh-Betriebsforschungsinstitut GmbH (BFI) is one of Europe's leading private-sector institutes for applied research and development in the field of steel technology and connected branches. BFI is a non-profit, limited liability company for which Steel Institute VDEh is the only shareholder. The main object of institute’s work is the cross-process optimisation of steel production under resource efficiency, product quality, economic and environmental aspects.

BFI has a staff of about 100 people, 70 % of them being scientists and engineers with long term experience on the processes of the steel industry. More than 40 of them are working in the division ‘Measurement and Automation’. The focus here is research and development in the field of new sensor technologies, as well as the development and application of data evaluation techniques and analytical process models for process control, and finally research and development in the field of advanced control and cross-process optimisation approaches such as Industry 4.0.  The involved department “Quality and information technology” has extensive experience in two major working fields: all aspects concerning the data analytics of industrial data (e.g. data pre-processing, data mining and development of statistical models) and the development of industrial IT solutions working 24x7 at the sites of our industrial partners.

Main tasks in the project:

  • the development and implementation of algorithms and tools for Data Analytics and Data Visualisation by application of technics of data mining and machine learning, including data driven model development, and visualisation of high dimensional huge data sets
  • the implementation of knowledge data bases
  • the transfer of these findings into suitable software tools and modules integrated in the IT systems of the industrial project partners.